Month: May 2012

A CONTEMPLATION

Fear, Anxiety and Worry

Feeling free of fear, anxiety and worry: I think this makes for a happy person.

You can still feel lonely at times. But there’s nothing to fear or being anxious about or to worry about. If something bad happens, something good is going to follow. (Eventually!) It has to be like this. For there is change all the time. If there wouldn’t be any change, the universe would be very boring!

APOPTOSIS is a normal cell death. It is programmed and happens continuously. (So we have a totally different body today from the one we had two years ago!)

CANCER on the other hand is an abnormal cell division. It is uncontrolled. A neoplastic cell is a cell that is part of a tumour.

I read about this in DEEPAK CHOPRA’S book ‘POWER; FREEDOM and GRACE’. According to DEEPAK, cancer cells ‘have lost the memory of death; they don’t know how to die, and in their quest for immortality, they kill the host body upon which they are dependent for their life.’

‘Death, therefore, is the ticket to life, and death is happening right now in our body-mind. . . . .’ I find this is a very interesting concept. So why are we afraid of change, when in reality change is happening all the time? Indeed, I ask myself, why are so many people forever afraid of change?

Well, what DEEPAK CHOPRA wrote, made me think. I felt I wanted to write about it in a blog, that maybe some bloggers would have an opinion on it and comment on it. I’d love to read your comment!

It’s only three and a half months since I blogged this blog about pictures as Memory Triggers. Since it created a great response at the time, I want to try and reblog it as a Memory Trigger.

AuntyUta

Pictures as Memory Triggers

 Two brothers, both students at the University of Leipzig (Germany), went out together to see a movie. Two young girls, who wore identical dresses, in a giggly mood followed the students into the cinema and sat down behind them. One of the students was my father Alexander, twenty-one at the time, and one of the girls was my mother Charlotte.

Naturally, the two young students did get to know the two girls. Soon the four of them went on outings together, and before long the two young men even started visiting the girls’ home, where they were well received by the girls’ widowed mother.

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Five years later Charlotte and Alexander were married. In the meantime Charlotte’s sister Ilse had been engaged to Alexander’s brother Edmund for a few months. Ilse broke the engagement off and later  married well- to -do  Adolf S.

After World…

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A Visit in 1977

Alexander and Edmund at the Völkerschlachtdenkmal,
Leipzig, in the 1920s

My father died in 1966 (aged 62 years). At the time we could not afford to travel to Germany. The last time I saw him was in 1959 when we left Germany to live in  Australia.

In 1977 we were able to travel to Germany for a visit. One of our stops was Augsburg, where my father’s brother Edmund lived with his second wife, Flora. Edmund had been a widower, so had been Flora. When they married they agreed that when they died they would be buried with their first spouses. They thought that this was a common sense thing to do, because they had married each other when they both were in retirement already. As I recall, Edmund would have been seventy-five in 1977. Flora would have been somewhat younger. She was a retired medical practitioner. However she was still energetic enough to do some part-time work doing medical check-ups on men who were about to apply for a job in the Bundeswehr (German Army).

Some of my relatives had warned me, that Flora was proud to always stick to proper etiquette. ‘Don’t forget to buy flowers for her, when you visit,’ we were told. Arriving at Augsburg Station the first thing we did, was to look for a flower-shop. I think we bought carnations. And I think we arrived a little bit late for the visit. They had of course been expecting us. We were very welcomed and I could see, Flora was pleased with the flowers. We noticed they lived in a superb extremely well furnished apartment. They suggested they would first show us a bit the city, then they would take us for lunch; and afternoon coffee would be back at their place.

Uncle Edmund was always just Uncle E for us. He was the one who had been amused when I told him as a nine year old that I was dancing ‘swing’. He was also the one who had been studying in Leipzig together with my father. One of my cousins thinks my father promoted as Dr. rer. pol. But I think this was Uncle E’s title. I’ve always known my father to have the title of Dr. phil. Anyhow I include here again the photos of Alexander and Edmund from the time in Leipzig in about 1925, where both men met my mother Charlotte as well as my mother’s sister Ilse. (My mother was only fourteen at the time!)

Edmund

Alexander, Charlotte, Ilse, Edmund
Leipzig, about 1925

Now back to our visit in Augsburg in 1977.  I should mention that the two of us, Peter and I, were the visitors there. Flora and Edmund were splendid in showing us around. Augsburg is quite popular with tourists and we did see a lot. We have some old photos to prove it. What im pressed us quite a bit, was the ‘Fuggerei’, which was established as a low cost housing project some five hundred years ago and is still going. It is very interesting to read up on it and here is the link to the Fuggerei.

The Neptun Fountain in front of
the entrance to the Fuggerei

Here we stand at another Fountain

This is a fountain inside the Fuggerei

A street in the Fuggerei

Somewhere in the city is a beautiful restaurant called the ‘Fuggerei Stube’. We had an enormous lunch there.

Here I am with Flora and Edmund in their apartment